Physical or virtual machines may run business critical or other applications. An entire physical or virtual machine or individual files or folders of the physical or virtual machine may require backup to ensure that the physical or virtual machine may be recovered in the event of a failure. Such backup of a physical or virtual machine may be difficult to create because the physical or virtual machine disks and/or drives may be altered regularly by users or system applications. For example, once a backup of a physical or virtual machine is initiated, a user may write data to one or more drives of the physical or virtual machine, thus altering the data that requires backup. Further, in some situations, backup of physical or virtual machines may consume too many system resources and may bog down the system.